


Fierce and Gallant

by cenobe, MiddieDM



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Blood and Violence, Canon Related, Canon Rewrite, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Descent into Madness, Gen, Heavy Angst, Loss, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:27:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21695365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cenobe/pseuds/cenobe, https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiddieDM/pseuds/MiddieDM
Summary: On a hunting night, Henryk loses track of Gascoigne. Later on, he learns he's lost so much more.
Relationships: Father Gascoigne/Henryk, Henryk & Gascoigne
Comments: 4
Kudos: 22





	Fierce and Gallant

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Aguerrido y gallardo](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21111146) by [cenobe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cenobe/pseuds/cenobe). 



> An English translation to my Bloodborne fic, brought to you by Google Translate, Reverso Corrector, my ever so lovely friend Middie who kindly offered to beta read and correct this despite knowing little to nothing about Bloodborne and is an ABSOLUTE ANGEL as well as AN ACTUAL PROFESSIONAL TRANSLATOR, and myself, who loves neglecting uni work in favour of self-indulgent writing! I leave you with a whacky translation of my original Spanish notes:
> 
> A personal interpretation of Henryk's descent into madness, from the moment he parts ways with Gascoigne during their hunt in Yarnham to the point where he heads to the Oedon Tomb. Started in August and continued throughout October, translated between November and early December.
> 
> This fic takes some things into assumption, that I'll make clear here to avoid any possible confusion: Gascoigne and Viola's daughter is called Alannah, and she's an only child; Henryk had already been a hunter when Ludwig still lived; Henryk knows of the playable Hunter's condition (being able to skip through dreams/lamps [the Hunter also is referred to with they/them pronouns]); and when Henryk finds the bodies in the graveyard Alannah has already ventured outside looking for her family/a safe place. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Every night felt like the last night. Henryk ignored the dark premonition that was chasing him since ruin decided to stop at Yarnham, and stuck to counting facts. When he believed his mind was going to give in to all the horror and the iron-like, persistent aroma of blood, he counted those that came to mind, those that were true to him, and in that he stayed sane. During those moments, tainting the city's cobblestones with the blood that dripped slowly from his blade, he made a mental inventory of those that were pushing him to go on.

They were on the hunt: it was getting dark, and the beasts inside the buildings, sewers and men arose to feed once more. Gascoigne was his partner: he had been since he disembarked in that cursed land. The two understood each other, even though there was so little to understand about the hell they were bound to live through. They also understood what the Father had made of Henryk, but they never talked about it. Henryk knew why he had remained, and that Gascoigne knew as well. What he ignored was if Gascoigne noticed that mutual awareness, or if he believed it unique to his person.

They had separated: a few poor bastards infected with the thirst for blood and the hunger for moonlight assaulted them in the lower part of the city, even though the smell of incense was so thick that it made them sick. One of them, armed with an improvised spear, had stricken Gascoigne on the shoulder. The blood had flowed out of him, and Henryk wouldn’t tell himself, but the cry he uttered only differed from those of the beasts craving his flesh in its ferocity.

After that Gascoigne split one of them in two with his axe, and the other three dispersed before that sight. Henryk reached one in the leg with a poisoned knife that limited their race to a few meters, ended in the burst of their blood, and his partner hunted the second. But the third, the one who had hurt him in the shoulder, had escaped, and although it challenged his best judgment Gascoigne had gone after them.

Henryk called his name only once, and Gascoigne didn't react. He had disappeared into the shadows of the city, ready to take on an insignificant revenge, and had left the old hunter alone. He observed the trail he'd left behind him, while behind a thick elm door, closed and locked tightly, rhythmic slaps, given by at least half a dozen of fools started to grow louder. Henryk did not know if that hypnotic and frantic rhythm was marked in reality or in his mind, and he had left the place without finding out.

He had made his way to the Great Bridge: that was where he and Gascoigne met when the hunt led them on separate paths. In the past it had also been the official meeting point for Church hunters. At dawn, they had looked at each other's faces, some smiling with bloodstained teeth, saying nothing. Henryk had gotten to see Ludwig, the Holy Blade march among them, as solemn, dignified, and enormous as he was, and stick his sword on the ground, waiting for the high priest to open the doors of the Ward. As soon as they heard the old gates begin to yield, they all burst into jubilation, men, women and others screaming triumphantly and waving their weapons in the air. But by the time Gascoigne arrived in the mainland, all that the sound of the door provoked on those who were left —less than half the hunters there were back then— was a resigned and unworthy relief of being alive. Although for Henryk that had lost meaning a long time ago.

Despite the stalking of memories, the first thing Henryk noticed on the bridge was that Gascoigne was not there. And then he had to resort to everything he knew, because instead of restlessness a lively despair began to overcome him. Gascoigne was fine, but it wasn't a fact. Viola and little Alannah were fine, that had to be one: they were at home, curled up in the underground shelter, waiting for dawn together. Gascoigne had gone astray, and was hunting on his own somewhere else, but after all he hunted, for that was his duty. His name was Henryk, he was a hunter from the League, and his partner was Father Gascoigne. He was in Yarnham, and he was hunting. But he had to find him.

The more his steps echoed throughout the city, the more difficult it became to tell the facts apart. It was something that happened to him often in recent times. Gascoigne had perfected the ability of anchoring his feet to the ground, of reminding him with a grunt that they were there and that they were together in this. However, the Father had long since begun to change. Henryk had found no method, no trick, no sound or touch that could bring back Gascoigne when his pupils dilated and violence overtook him and he could not remember his name or what colour the grass was in his homeland. The answer lied in a few music notes that the old hunter did not understand, but he ignored for how much longer it would work. Besides, Gascoigne was not there. Neither to shelter him, nor to shelter himself. And there was a premonition telling Henryk that they had hunted together for the last time. He didn't know how long it would take for it to become a fact.

He was hiding in the shadows of Yarnham's tired out and blackened bricks, invisible to the processions of sorry excuses for a hunter, lit by torches and their own collective hatred, rooted on a grotesque ignorance. Towards what or who turned that anger, in recent times, Henryk didn't know. He ignored where he was going, where Gascoigne had gone, where the night was going. The moon had crimsoned early, and the old hunter was tired of living from one to another, wondering what horrors its light would shine on this time. Like a sickened eye on him, it kept making absence shimmer. And the premonition saying that absence would be what would end up breaking him, after enduring so many a scourge, was becoming a fact ever so slowly.

Because Henryk had heard Gascoigne's bell ring in the plaza east of the Bridge, but he hadn't found him there. The worn and useless scent of a strange hunter must be the reason. In no case was it a sign. Instead of telling him about his whereabouts, that information only worsened his companion's state in Henryk's mind. It was beginning to become irreversible. Amidst the distant echoes of steel sinking into bone, of bullets bouncing against stone and of fire burning into flesh, Henryk heard Gascoigne's cries over and over again, screams of pain and anger, and at the same time of no human emotion. Whatever had thrown the Father down the streets, after a futile objective and in the direction opposite his own person, was what would finally destroy him. And if Henryk couldn't live among people, was he to live only among beasts? Or even worse, like one?

He was heading to the Tomb of Oedon, which for a few years had marked the limit of their area of action as a team. There was something deeply frightening in the notion of limits, then, more fearsome than the whispers of insight that Henryk had been turning away from for decades. The old hunter did not manage to make any of them a fact, but all were gradually turning into premonitions. And all of them seemed to seek to point out that both he and Gascoigne had surpassed each and every one of their limits. Henryk recognised as facts many of his own, of his excesses. He was too old, had killed too much, and had been with Gascoigne for too long. He loved him too much, and he loved his family too much, and although he had long thought that it would throw him to an end someday, he never thought it would take emptiness, loneliness, absence to finally do so.

At the gates of the cemetery, the heavy evening breeze brought the scent of two bloods: one beloved and one human. The former was never known, never with so much love or so fresh; and the latter had never been more than an obstacle along the way. None of the meanings known until then survived the few steps Henryk had to take towards Gascoigne's body. None could have.

The thought that he was unrecognizable in that state would have been the greatest possible relief to Henryk's mind then, in the face of irreversibility. But it was a lie. Even more monstrous than he already was, even more mutilated than he already was, the old hunter would have recognised his partner.

Henryk marveled in silence at how much Gascoigne resembled the beasts whose deaths he'd made his work and crusade in that state, and, at the same time, how much he resembled the man he'd replaced. Henryk recognized in his thick and foul fur the tone of his grey hair, and among his molars, that unlike his fangs had kept their size, some of his silver fillings could still be seen. He had claws for hands, but strangely the old hunter recognized them. He had lost his boots in favour of hooves, and Henryk wondered if he would have been able to follow his trail knowing that there was nothing left salvageable in him. He had also grown in height, although it already exceeded that of most natives prior to degenerating. Crouching down next to the body, Henryk wondered if he was facing degeneration or if what had torn his way through Gascoigne was simply his true and final form.

Henryk was able to read Gascoigne from the past just as he was able to read his wounds in the present, and the language of the battle that had ended him in every footstep on the earth, in every dulled gravestone and in the posts of the darkened lamps. Gascoigne had been hunted down. Old Henryk was not able to seize in his mind how many hours had passed since they'd become separated, but he was soaked in their sufficiency for the Father to lose himself, and for someone to remedy it. He had been treated with the hunter's cure. His remains smelled of blood, lead and fire, and no coffin would welcome him. It was well known among hunters that beasts were not given burial.

He was stripped of his axe, and on the side of the road. His hunter's badge, the access to his knowledge and possessions, had also been removed from his person. Someone was jumping between dreams, and had torn the Father from the last one he'd lived. He had robbed Henryk of the anchor, of companionship and love, but that didn't matter then.

The Father's beastly face, above his torn clothes and torn tissue and below the blindfolds on his eyes, was frozen in a grimace of pain, which in no way resembled that caused by the spear blow that ultimately separated them. It was a human pain. And for Henryk that was the key in prophesying that Gascoigne was not the only one he had lost in the graveyard.

At the far end of the cemetery, toward the chapel, the artificial silence that reigned over the graves was challenged by a gentle drip. A blood of latent infection, not by pollution of the owner's stream, but by proximity to a bearer of the disease. If giving in to the paralysis, refraining from moving towards it would have made it disappear, Henryk would have stood there staring at it, until his perishable body had collapsed and the earth swallowed his bones. But nothing could undo what was done. Thus, he walked onwards.

Gascoigne's death would not be able to take away the foundation of reality, the binomial Henryk needed as much as blood, of fact and premonition. Life, if only it was the thing pushing him forward, could carry on. That was a fact. But without Viola, that security tumbled and plunged Henryk's mind into the indomitable silence.

He needn't go up the graveyard stairs to know it was her. From there, Henryk was certain that it was her blonde hair, that it was her black shawl, and that it was her dark, sticky blood spilling from the shed's rooftop to the wet and rotten grass at his feet. He fell to his knees on top of it. He wanted to stop its flow, catch the drops that fell one after the other and without meaning with his bare hands, but he didn't dare.

Viola was dead. Henryk would never hear her voice again at dawn, when Gascoigne remained sane enough to recognize his home's doorway and recognize his wife, who laughed profuse tears of relief, joy and sadness; he would not get to hesitate when she invited him to come inside on those occasions to pour him tea and toasts, nor would he waver once more when she asked him to make unrealisable promises, that he protect her husband from what turned their music box into a memory and a necessity, although it was unavoidable; he would never see her face trimmed against the window that bore iron bars even before her birth, nor would he come closer to listen to her tell him that without him she and her family would be lost.

It was a reality too cruel to be endured. The night had taken much of what Henryk treasured, and he'd always had to move on. But Gascoigne's grimace of regret was stained with the dark, sticky blood that spilled from Viola. The Father's link with reality had been broken by a thirst unquenched or quenched in excess, that Henryk watched be gestated in silence like so many others before it; but Viola's bond with the Father was unwavering, and she had left the shelter of her home under the red moon convinced that this bearing would be enough to recover her husband from the ever so red path he had entered. She ignored, undoubtedly, that there was no possible return for him.

Music and love had failed in their quest and had proved the futility of an alleged redemption unworthy of the faith Viola had placed in it. And Henryk, who had renounced any love and warmth as long the blood was his duty (and it could never wash from him, or anything else), was to keep on hunting knowing that he had lost them because he had been unable to follow his partner, in the hunt and in the descent. Wondering if he could have stopped him, catch Gascoigne at the end of it was a curse greater than any scourge.

He was going to go crazy. All the footsteps, all the reasons, all the thoughts that had prevented him from searching for Gascoigne seemed insignificant, and a waste of time. What was the worth of his wanderings through Yarnham, of him crawling in the past and in feelings projected as a distant memory although he still didn't know then that they would never be anything else? He clutched his head without realising it, clenching his skull as if he could exorcise the greatest failure of his miserable existence from his mind, which had always been hunting in the wrong direction, and that'd cost him the three lives that had mattered most to him.

He would never know to what luck or misfortune he owed the yielding in his petty hands of the only truth that could save him then. He opened his eyes and saw with impossible clarity his knees on the grass, and the blood stains on the yellow cloth, and a pebble peeking wet from the night and spring. There weren't three. There were two. Alannah was still waiting for her parents to return, with her little hands clenched to her chest and imbued with the scent of incense, unable to conceive that she had already lived their last reunion. It was Henryk's duty to go to her, and she everything he had left.

He wouldn't remember breaking through the vertical streets of Yarnham, flooding them with dark blood, inevitable as long as his advance was too. He had spent more decades than he could count living there, and even when he was in the square that adjoined Gascoigne and Viola's modest dwelling, he was unable to remember his name, to see the darkened sky in the background, or to hear the howls and the shots in the distance, to interpret any sign of the hunt. He was not a hunter, pounding their door next to the censer, as if throwing it down could restore what was lost, with his soaked cleaver in his free hand, barking Alannah's name again and again in a hoarse voice.

He needed her there. He needed to hear her sweet little voice wish him a good night, and call him by the nickname only she was allowed to use; he needed to see her silhouette in the window, trimmed by candles, and see her face at dawn, when such light was no longer necessary, with her sleepiness-filled eyes and her charming little white bow on her head; he needed her to throw her arms around him once more, snuggling her head against his clothes no matter how dirty they were, and to look at him from below with the dimple in her cheek and a word of sincere gratefulness in her mouth of orange jasmine; he needed an explanation for what had happened, why her mother lay disemboweled on the cemetery shed and why her father had not been able to recognize in her or her music the only reason of happiness he had known. But first of all he needed her there, safe and sound. Only with that could his life carry on.

He got no response at the front door. Before losing hope and what was left of his sanity, he ran to the other side of the building, walking along the pointed fences that guarded the house from the fearsome fall into the sewers. There was a window, immersed in the same incense, next to which Henryk knew that Alannah waited for dawn, for the return of the sun (the star and her family), on the nights Viola had to leave to meet or to search for Gascoigne. The old hunter held back a single moment to make sure that no shadow or blood had followed him there, but the street was deserted.

He put a trembling hand between the bars of dark forge, ignorant of what he should do, what he should say. If Alannah was not there, he would never find anything again. But before he could call again, the girl's sweet and cautious voice broke through.

“Grandpa?”

She must have recognized his silhouette at dusk, or his smell or his voice at the door, and had waited for him there, where she wouldn't draw attention from the mobs patrolling the city. Henryk rested his head in the gap between the bricks and the bronze. His heart was broken, but relieved, and his mind cracked, but beating with hope. The blood that pumped from one into the other was just as dirty, and yet it was enough. Atonement laid before him in the small and abandoned silhouette of a little fay who had Viola's blonde hair and Gascoigne's grey eyes. Henryk got closer to the window and inhaled the air needed for a word of warning, of gratitude, of condolences. However, another voice deeper into the house overlapped the small and hoarse pronunciation of the only name he had in mind.

“Alannah, who are you talking to?”

“It's grandpa, mum! But he’s alone…”

Henryk stopped in his tracks.

He needed nothing more. It was as simple as that.

The hand he had around the bars fell by its own weight back to his side. Without a doubt, his desire was to think he was mistaken. The body torn in the cemetery could have been that of any unfortunate yarnhamite who had walked into the wrong blade on the wrong night, and her appearance only chance; the grimace of pain and regret on Gascoigne's beastly face a mere reflection of his own lament, an illusion of moonlight. Maybe the gears in his old mind were not greased enough, or they were greased the wrong way. What deprived him of the right to believe that those were Viola and Alannah, snug under their roof, widow and fatherless but safe and sound as well?

The passage of time, unfortunately. It had been too long. Too many years, too many nights and too many hunts, and their force was undeniable. Henryk closed his eyes, and felt as if he did so for the first time in decades. He was never going to sleep again. He was never going to eat again. He didn't want to know, but he knew.

The house before him was completely empty. The child's chamber bed was undone, but empty. The bodies of father, mother and daughter were chilling in the open, without burial, without prayer, and without remedy. Each had been thrown to the bitter end in a different direction, like a macabre firework. In life they had made of union their strength, their reason for living, but in death they had all unknown each other. She had found herself in the cold and insensitive emptiness of despair, in the insignificance of an error and of existence, ended among the futile reminder of so many others; he had known a punishment greater than that which no man, no matter how lost, should have the right to know; and the little one had left home with a heart full of hope and fear of finding what she was looking for, for a lighthouse in the distance that had turned out to be only a trap for animals that were as tender and sweet as she.

Henryk had seen the shadows of night drag away the lives (in every conceivable sense) of the people whom he believed he was protecting in some past countless times, and yet he never believed enough that the same could happen to him. They were his Gascoigne, his Viola, his Alannah, and he Henryk. None of the corpses he walked past each full moon without even looking at them had felt that faultless love for them. Perhaps they had made a mistake as big as letting Gascoigne become what he was meant to be, but how to fight against that fate? How to continue, from then on?

With one foot in front of the other. Henryk looked towards the purple sky and walked through the square towards the cemetery. There was no room for revenge in his mind. His mind was a goldfinch. His mind was pumpkin porridge, and water from a well. He saw again and again the place for his dead family between those gaps: a reflection in a drop, a figure in the steam, a colour between two mosses. But none smiled at him.

It was Henryk who had lost them, but it wasn't Henryk who had killed them. If he went to the Tomb and turned into a gravestone, would the real culprit show up to pray to him? A beast, undoubtedly. A beast had killed Viola. A beast had killed Gascoigne. And Alannah had gone down the ladder on her way to the cathedral only to throw herself into the moist, stinking, putrid mouth of a beast. Henryk was lucky (yes, he finally believed it was luck) to be an expert in hunting beasts.

And not only beasts. It didn't matter what shape they had, although everything at that moment, the buildings, the trees, the flames, had the same shape. Henryk wouldn't know it was them. But there was no need. The only warm thing on him then was the blooming fluid of the stems he pruned at any corner, regardless of the weapon they wielded. He wanted a butterfly to fly over him. He wanted to feel the paper-thinness of its wings between his molars, and grind them.

He crouched down in front of the Tomb lamp. He put off its flame with a soft blow that dispersed Alannah's bangs and made the edges of her bow fly for an instant. That always made her laugh. However Henryk was sunk in immense sadness. He bore on his right arm a violence greater than the universe, pent-up in a glass jar. He wanted to find out from which glass the ultimate culprit of his downfall was made. Because he was lost forever, drifting forever. But he was also ready. Until the end, he would be ready. That ghost would not appear before him straight from the dream and into the lamp's light. Regardless of the price, he would see them coming. Henryk looked up at the sky and the eye of the Great Ones looked back at him.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading all the way to here! I hope you suffered reading this as much as I suffered writing it!


End file.
